"Mongolia is kind of close, right?" Story about an attempt to ski everywhere in the world where there's snow. And in some places where there isn't. On and off-piste skiing on all continents, skiing into craters of live volcanoes, caving, climbing, photography, and travel.

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Östersolberg II

While I was travelling for work and fun for the last couple of weeks, Jarmo had scouted several bunker sites. His visit to an incredibly large bunker in Siuntio's Östersolberg provoked our interest as well, and last Saturday Janne, Olli, and me went there as well.

The bunker was indeed large, by my (foot) estimate the concrete shield on top was 19 m by 19 m. Jarmo's estimate from Google Maps was 20 m x 20 m.

However, it is far more difficult to say what's inside. On the top, the construction looks fine, with a central, large gun tower, two entrance tunnels from opposite sides, and a set of chimneys or air shafts to the side. As if the bunker had heating, or a kitchen? :-)

And one of the entrance tunnels is open enough for us to enter. However, the insides are so completely destroyed that we can't get particularly far. I was able to get near the central gun mount, but had no idea how to go towards the area that housed the air shafts, for instance. And I don't know how many floors the structure had. One, and the internal explosion that destroyed the bunker ripped the roof slab into two layers? Or two, and we're looking at a floor?

It is easy to go maybe 10 meters from the entrance tunnel, and you can peek towards the rest of the structure. But actually getting to the rest is the difficult part. There's nothing except a wall on the right side, the side where one would expect to find more rooms leading to the air shafts. On the left, towards the gun tower there's hanging floors/ceilings and twister rebar. I was able to sneak through an opening to take some of the pictures in this blog article, but it didn't feel particularly safe to go further.